Unions Improve Chinese Workers' Welfare - Results from 1,268 Firms

Yang Yao and Ninghua Zhong ()

Microeconomics Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research

Abstract: Based on a survey of 1,268 firms in 12 Chinese cities, this paper empirically studies the effects of unions on three aspects of workers welfare, namely, hourly wages, monthly working hours, and pension coverage. Our baseline results show that unionization increases hourly wage rates by 5.6%, reduces monthly working hours by 1.4%, and raises pension coverage by 12.3%. Taking the endogeneity of unionization into consideration, our 3SLS estimation finds larger effects. These results are robust in the subsample of domestic private enterprises where unions are less common than in other types of firms. Further econometric analysis has established two channels for unions to improve workers welfare, one by encouraging collective wage contracts, and the other by encouraging written contracts.

Keywords: Unionization; Chinese firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eaber.org/node/22039 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 301 [REDIRECT LOOP] Moved Permanently (http://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22039)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eab:microe:22039

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Microeconomics Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shiro Armstrong ().